If you have a medical kit, it contains five tools a tincture (d4), a tourniquet (d6), a lancet (d8), a trephine (d10), and a bonesaw (d12). When you’ve used one to stabilise someone, cross it out.
When you go to stabilise someone, secretly choose a tool. The person being stabilised secretly chooses a number of HP between 1 and 12. You can tell the referee if either of you aren’t trustworthy.
Roll your tool die. If you roll over the number of HP the dying person chose, they are healed to that number of HP. If you do not, they bleed out.
You must repair your tools if you use it. They cost that dice size to repair.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
A Familiar Tower is a 39 page module for Old School Essentials by Directsun, with art by Skullboy and graphic design and development by Sam Sorenson. In it, you’re trapped inside a tower, and you need to get out. I can’t really review this in any meaningful capacity without spoiling the puzzle you’re trying to solve, so fair warning there be spoilers ahead.
Layout and information design here varies between choices that obscure and clarify; the inner cover is two maps, one a not-quite isometric view, showing the rooms and their page numbers; the other showing, in addition, the floor plans of each level in a traditional 5 foot grid. Good, clear. But features that hold true for the whole tower are on the copyright page, which I don’t like as a design decision; honestly I don’t typically read the copyright page and I only noticed this because I was reading in digital. Headings are bold, minimaps are reproduced, read-aloud text is bolded and other locations or features are page referenced. Good, clear. It should be noted, though, that you’re going to do a lot of page-turning given that all stat blocks and items are in an appendix that these references point to. It was very difficult to make heads or tails of this module digitally, although thank goodness the page references have hyperlinks (I did a lot of scrolling back and forth even with that blessing, though). The choice to put Advanced Tower Mechanics — only 2 paragraphs — at the end of the key, instead of at the beginning, honestly makes it a little more difficult to understand, as it describes things that should be other keys, and details a few events that should probably be detailed in the main text, although I don’t disagree that it be duplicated elsewhere. But the result is that it’s unclear. Skullboy’s art and maps both are peerless, and suit the humour of the book in a way that feels like a collaboration rather than simply an illustration. It’s excellent stuff.
Directsun specialises in puzzle dungeons, and the mechanic you’re playing with here is one of size, however, unlike typically, how the mechanic works isn’t crystal clear: “Entering or leaving the tower changes an object’s size by a factor of fifty.“. Enlarges it, or shrinks it? Well, it’s not clear from the explanatory text, which is entirely by reference to the replica tower (well, technically not a replica, through magic): If something enters the replica tower, it appears in “your” tower as fifty times larger, and if something leaves the replica tower, it is retrieved at fifty times larger. The puzzles include a variety of options to use this mechanism, including remaining large and shrinking yourselves down, and changing item sizes in either direction. I recognise that not providing the solutions to the puzzles is an intentional choice; however the fact that I struggled to figure out the mechanisms doesn’t work for me as a referee; this is a book that wants you to read it’s entirety before understanding it. No more is this book’s insistence on your reading it in it’s absolute entirety and understanding it as a whole more frustrating to me that where it reveals how to escape the tower at all: This is first described on page 35 in an appendix, although it’s alluded to on page 13, which I admittedly missed until my second read through. While, after struggling through this challenging information design for this review, I wouldn’t have trouble running this module, I don’t know that I’ll remember in a week, and it took me over an hour to decipher exactly how to approach this fairly short book.
If you power on through that lack of clarity better than I did, though, the rooms themselves are absolutely choc-a-block with interactive content; typically at least 2 or 3 things to interact with. There are 14 locations in all, and at least each of the five floors features a puzzle for the players to figure out, ranging from very simple (the marble puzzle on level 2 feels introductory), to more challenging (the giant switch in the basement will take a lot more planning). This level of complexity does have its’ negatives: There’s a lot of text, and a lot to parse and then communicate back to the players; I think that an alternative approach to the keying would work better for such complexity, as this approach would have me leaping from paragraph to paragraph and then back again as the players ask questions, not to mention to the appendix and back to grasp the NPCs that are described in considerable detail. Frustratingly, these really compelling and funny characters often have their descriptions split across sections — it’s on page 15 you find out that you’re gien a quest to cross items off Carbuncle’s bucket list, but what the bucket list is? Page 28. There’s a bunch of information like this that should have been co-located, in my opinion. But the characters themselves are the kind to sink your teeth into, so long as you don’t mind a module that leans into the lighthearted — most of these are Wonderland-esque speaking animals. I think they’re a pleasure.
A Familiar Tower is an excellent puzzle, but it’s not a module for someone like me who likes to run things blind, because it wants to be the kind of module that doesn’t explain itself ahead of time. For a module whose location content is less than 25 pages, honestly, I don’t see why it doesn’t want to spend more time explaining itself. The puzzle itself, and the humour in the characters within, are excellent and would be a pleasure to run. If you’ve the time and capacity to parse the module, though, A Familiar Tower will be an incredibly memorable few sessions of fun characters to play and meet, and the promise of plenty of shenanigans.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
Hot Property is a 3 page module by Norgad for Mausritter, released for Mausritter month in 2025. It details the vault of a mysterious company, which you’re likely to be breaking into to steal everything you can hold. I was provided a community copy by the author.
The map of the surrounds of the Iron Fortress take about half a page, in typical Mausritter (and let’s be frank, Norgad), terseness. Here, the terseness causes some glitches, for example, a timer triggers when the party enters the inspection area, but the inspection area isn’t actually mentioned (although you can assume it’s the access dock where “No weapons [are] allowed.“). You’ve got to be willing to improvise to run a Mausritter module. The other half of the page covers encounters — all of which feature one of the 2 factions interacting — and how to escalate them in line with the timer, a few odd treasures, and stats for the two factions. The second page covers the key for the 16 room Iron Fortress. The map has a lot of character, and honestly we don’t see enough side-view maps of dungeons, and it has some interesting loops, interactive elements and potential secret doors to hidden treasures to keep it interesting. It’s clever with folding a little depth into its’ rooms with few words — “suspiciously muddy prisoners” are a hint for an escape tunnel, for example, but a lot of these are blink and you’ll miss it, and I suspect under the pressure of the timer, and the fact that you’ve only got 20 turns to get in and out of a 16 room dungeon, means that the players will likely be rushing.
Or at least, I think they should be. The timer aspect of this module elevates it, although I wish there were a more concrete way of indicating to the players included exactly how long they have to achieve their goals. As it is, there’s a chance that they might realise they need to flee 3 turns before the entire fortress collapses and they have to find a way to escape the eels that occupy the lake that serves as its’ moat. There’s a bit of unused space on the third page of this module, and I think it would be better to spend that space to provide a little in-world illustration of the risks of being in the vault in the form of little notes between the managers. You could include these in certain rooms and refer out to the back page to preserve the tight layout, or you could indicate that the workers have an idea of what’s in the bottom of the fortress, and then it wouldn’t be a surprise, but rather the resolution to a developing dread. As written, the climax is likely to be a fight for the few seats on the barge between the party, the workers who are explicitly not bad people, and the group of revolutionaries who are at least against the masterminds of the scheme. I think if I ran it, I’d need to tweak something to prevent that grim ending.
The layout here is tight and usable, and comes in 2 versions. I’m not sure exactly what the format of the primary layout actually is (it’s called “A5 wide pamphlet”), but from the itch.io page it looks like a trifold. The 3-page makes more sense to me, although in neither of the versions is the space fully utilised, and in a way that feels a little unintentional. That said, in a 3 page version, I’d run it off just the middle 2 pages, and I’d have everything I need so long as I was able to improvise, so this would be my preference given the content on the other pages. And the art — primarily maps aside from the cover which is excellent and evocative of the timer-oriented heist that is intended — is clear, cute and useful. Precisely what you need to run the module. I feel obligated to add that while I don’t have the physical version of this, every physical Norgad product I’ve own is absurdly high quality in physical, and if you like a hefty pamphlet, it might be worth looking into the physical version if there are any available.
Overall, I like Hot Property a lot, and I like it’s themes and the lack of a clear villain, as well as the timer elements. It stands out from the crowd of short pamphlet adventures because of these additions. I’m always on the look out for yet another Mausritter one-shot to run, and if you’re looking for a little, one-shot heist, I’d check it out, so long as you’re happy for that little bit of tweaking.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
Sailors on the Starless Sea is a 15 page module for Dungeon Crawl Classics by Harley Stroh. It’s a funnel, designed to cull a score of level-zero characters to a party of level-1 ones. I’ve run a few funnels before, and a few in the rules-adjacent Mutant Crawl Classic, a game I should probably review by itself. I haven’t delved into the deep archives that are the DCC line of modules, but I find this being recommended repeatedly.
A chaos god is returning to life, and the characters must prevent them and brace an underground sea to save the people of their village. The backstory is wordy and flavour fully pulpy, but is really an excuse to flavour the adventure with chaos, and from then it jumps straight to rumours and an encounter table, which initially I thought was random but actually it’s just a list of encounters categorised by type — trap, creature, or puzzle. I’m really not sure the utility of this, and while I know this is a funnel, I’d appreciate a random encounter table given the homage to classic play suggested by…well, everything.
In the text we have 17 locations. Those locations are good, interesting almost without fail, and despite this written with all the flaws of a module in dungeon magazine: Block text, long-form undifferentiated text, with no highlights to help find relevant information. It’s not completely without finesse, but it’s minimalist to the point of challenging to scan. Certainly an example like Tomb of the Fallen, an entire A4 page, has differentiated text totally six bullet points and four read-aloud text blocks, is an interesting puzzle room, but challenging to parse. It’s a short adventure, and I suspect if you ran it a few times at a con you’d have it by heart quickly (which is how this was playtested, from the acknowledgments), but to run straight from the page I’d be thumbing through trying to work these puzzles out, while my players sat in doldrums.
With the obvious homage to classic modules from cover to cover, it’s worth delving into the layout I think first. It’s sparsely but excellently illustrated with beautifully detailed, bold and janky art in perfect homage to the days of the Fiend Folio. Block, A4 walls of text are presented directly to you sometimes for 2 or 3 pages at a go. This approach means it packs a lot of content into 15 pages. I’m reading this digitally, and it’s hell on my phone; after I finished my bath I pulled it up on my big screen at 100%, and it’s equally difficult to read; perhaps it is better on the page. Hopefully the content is designed around these barriers.
I like this module, to be honest. We’ve got some stellar encounters, a cool puzzle and some interesting traps and it’s deadly as hell in a pleasurable way. The vibes are immaculate. But the layout and approach is profoundly flawed, if intentionally or perhaps dogmatically so. I know that I can run an adventure like this — I’m a fan of Dungeon Magazine enough to make a podcast out of it — but why, with so many innovations in how to make these more playable, is dogmaticism and homage limiting the usability of modules? It’s disappointing to me. Harley Stroh, given a different approach and an inventive layout artist rather than being trapped in homage, would be sweet as pie. This is frozen lemon: If you squeeze it hard enough, and add some extra love and attention, you’ll get lemonade. But I can buy lemonade. So why would I turn first to Sailors on the Sunless Sea?
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
Grackles’ Vale is a 20 page module for a custom OSR system, by Randy Musseau with illustration, maps, layout and design by Roan Studio. In it, you seek bounty on a Boar-man that has been terrorising the village or Grackle’s Vale. I purchased this myself.
I’m a little mixed on the layout. It’s in A4 format, but only available in digital, and at the size choices, I can’t easily read it on either my phone or tablet. That’s a hell of a drag as that’s how I tend to run things, but if you run on a full sized monitor or are likely to print it out, it won’t be a problem. Within that format choice, it looks good — clear headings, use of bullets for tables, lovely art and clear and gorgeous maps. If you’re happy to wade through paragraph text in a double column A4 like the good old days, this will work well for you.
We open with a list of rumours and a brief high level description of the town. The rumours aren’t terribly juicy and often are things the players will already know if they’re not new to the genre. The 3 NPCs in this section could be communicated more clearly — none of them have clear agendas, and are pretty light on personality traits. This particular flaw rolls on throughout the module — even where there are characterised NPCs, they don’t tend to be characterised in a way that’s awfully useful to me as a referee. We then have a list of about 16 locations, which are intentionally written as independent from the adventure portion, and hence don’t give you much to dig your claws into. The second half of the module is the adventure itself. This consists a fairly linear trek up a valley, with a potential detour into a 20-odd room goblin catacomb, before encountering the boar-man, at which point you have achieved the objective. The writing here is purple, but effective, and if your preference is longer form prose, you’ll probably enjoy this.
Honestly, this feels like a module written by someone who’s only read Gygax and decided to write a module (the description of the innkeeper as “an attractive woman in her mid-thirties” clinched that for me, but the owl who pickpockets the PCs to “lighten the load of overburdened adventurers” is such a gygaxian impulse). The only point in the linear crawl up the valley where you’re making a decision is when you go into the unconnected dungeon; this could’ve been the point of the whole module, but instead that’s slaying a boss in another keep, a boss who to be honest it’s not clear you need to kill to claim the bounty, as there are plenty of boar-men about, and the torc that is the actual cause of the curse is a forsaken easter egg — I don’t actually see how it can be identified as the root cause in-world. It would be far better if the hooks provided rhyme or reason to enter to goblin dungeon, or if that dungeon gave you clues to the final battle, or if you were told that the torc not the boar-man was your target. If you need a village this one’s fine, but it’s not full enough of petty intrigues or holds into the boarmen or goblins to make me want to use it; the adventure part could be used with any village, with minimal modification.
And that’s my issue here in a nutshell: I don’t hate the gygaxian bent here — honestly it’s lovely the author has a distinct voice — I like the layout and like the art a lot, but no single part of this is magnetic or interconnected enough for me to feel a need to run it. Could I have run a fun few sessions with any of these changes? Yes, I could. And, there are some nice touches here. If you’re willing to put in the effort to make those changes, or you’re pretty happy to have something to cover your next few weeks of planned sessions without putting in too much thought, you could do worse than Grackles’ Vale.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
Echo Brine is a 57 page module for Shadowdark by Michael Faulk, Jeff Mitchell, and Scott Slater, with set by Michael Faulk and Graham Sternberg. In it, you seek for idols to destroy in order to bring down the barrier around the cursed Hemlock Cove. I think I was provided a complementary copy by the author.
Echo Brine opens with a 3 page, full text explanation of what’s going on. It’s a lot, and I think it could be both simplified and more clearly communicated to the players through a solid hook. In a nutshell, an intelligent, psychic meteor fell into the sea by the town of Hemlock Cove. These shards of rock corrupted the townsfolk to build a portal out of idols so that witches could summon a dark god. Also worshipping this dark god are squid-people and come to destroy the portal are the moth-people. The local mayor got a famous adventuring party in to solve the problem, which forced the god to retreat. There are also some witch-hunters who’re scouring the town for the witches. Here, the player characters enter, prompted by a random rumour, or else invited by a dead adventurer, witch-hunter, or the mayor. This is a complex set-up, but I do think that part of the issue here is not that it’s too complex, but rather it’s hard to track in the way it’s presented.
The rumours I’m mixed on; individually they provide players with unique sub-goals, something I really like — they change the way the players engage in a way I write about in Juicy Worms. But nothing here (aside from the note “Conversely, they can have been sent a letter from Kess Harrow before they died, Mayor Must before he was lost, or Inquisitor Steele“) actually links them up to the XP goals or provides them with any information about what’s going on in Hemlock Cove. Deeper in, I find issues with the barrier, and these rumours could’ve been a fun way to point the player characters towards the tunnel, the beach or the Dowager for entry — but only one of these rumours points anyone there, and that one doesn’t actually tell you the goal is in the Dowager. It’s great that they provide a way into the world of the module, but why is this module leaving it up to the referee to come up with why the player characters are there in the first place?
Next up are some special rules and random encounters. I like these random encounters, which vary from a monster to very specific situations. There are 15 encounters, with 3 of those having 4-8 sub-encounters that you roll again. You’re going to roll every 3 rounds while crawling, 50% chance when moving between locations. If moving between locations means moving around the village, then you’ve 15 locations here, 31 if you include the crawling, which means — you’ll start repeating some of these random encounters, and some of them are really one-off events, so you should be crossing them off. I suspect a different approach to random encounters was needed, perhaps using a curve to increase the less specific encounters probability of occurring, or perhaps one of Warren’s RAMdom tables given a lot of these events are one-off.
The town is walled off with a magical barrier. There are three points of entry, but there’s no effort put into entering the town in the introductory pages, and the broader landscape isn’t explored, so this isn’t an interesting puzzle to solve. Not a single rumour helps access the barrier. You’re going to face the player characters wandering around this barrier aimlessly for a while, which is not an interesting start to the adventure in my opinion. I think for this to work, I’d have to give them some clues, or expand the map considerably to facilitate a whole adventure about accessing Hemlock Cove in the first place.
I quite like the key itself. Boxed text with bolded points of interest are followed by their deeper descriptions. Larger locations have an inside and outside boxed text, which is nice and clear. Ordering can be a bit off — where this bolded points of interest exist, they’re not always at the top of the description, which I think is a mistake, but it’s legible and usable. NPCs found within these descriptions aren’t too thorough, but I like that they all at least have information on what they want from the party. I really, like, however, the change in format for dungeon type locations, where overall detail and specific denizens as well as “what can change” are provided, before the specifics of the rooms in in the location. These area also called out in colour, which helps signalling for navigation. All NPCs are detailed at the back of the book, which I don’t love given they’re almost all location specific; their descriptions are a perhaps a little too background-heavy for me — I don’t care about Inquisitor Steele’s childhood — but I do care about what her agenda is, and that is highlighted clearly. If they’d been briefer, they’d likely have fit in the main text more cleanly.
The layout here isn’t pleasing to my eye, but is clever. I think a lot of thought has been put into highlighting and signalling for ease of play, but limited budget means repeated art for these purposes, dungeon scrawl maps, and some jarring spacing and ordering choices. But, it all works and is readable, with the only major issue being the information ordering issues that recur throughout. These really occur primarily within spreads or pages, though, so you’re not flipping through pages searching for things.
Echo Brine is a mixed bag, for me. I love the nautical theme, I love the search for idols as a goal for the player characters, and I like that there are factions buried in here, with individual characters that interact with each other in interesting ways. But, the information design here made it hard to process a lot of what is good here, and to run it I’d have to put some effort into expanding the module as it’s short on hooks and clues to make it a well-paced few sessions. If you’re looking for a nautical-themed, character-heavy, fetch-quest style module, and particularly if you’re interested in the Shadowdark ecosystem, there’s a few sessions of fun in Echo Brine for you.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
More of Me is an 11 page one-shot module for Mothership by Jett Beswick-Wright. In it, you and your companions wake up with memories wiped in an undersea research facility. Will you escape? I received a complementary copy from the author.
More of Me, it should be said straight up, is a mind bend. Spoilers: You’ve been implanted with the memories of the facilities founder; a major aspect of the module is memory recall, and hence there’s a decent page count devoted to who the players used to be and the circumstances under which they came to be in the facility. The mechanic here is neat: Under certain circumstances, you are capable of remembering something about your past; if you try to remember something and your past self has no knowledge of the location, you will instead gain memories of the founder.
This is a 12ish room dungeon, with a major enemy, and 5 compelling NPCs. The fun twist for the major enemy — an ogre like creature who hunts you — is that he can’t fit through doors, so the module will have a very predictable rhythm in play as a result of this. The recall system is a clever way of figuring out what happened here in a way that feels organic, and it comes with a bunch of handouts that are documents that players may find in their explorations. Basically every room is of interest, which works for a high paced one-shot. The foes here all have clear agendas and will act in predictable ways which make it super easy to run and also will make the players feel clever when they figure out how to manipulate them.
Layout is clear and easy to understand. Descriptions require you intuit some of the spaces, but they feel like spaces you should be able to improvise easily for the most part. I’d prefer if the NPC information was in the locations you find them, rather than in the back, but in such a small book it’s fine.
My biggest criticism though is what I feel like is a significant overlook — precisely what the memories that you recall are left a little too unclear for me. I was expecting a memory list to be part of the handouts or additional material, given it’s not clear at all what the founders memories are supposed to be, and the characters memories are given one line. For such an important part of the module, I want a little extra support — as is, I’m forced to flick back through the introductory material and improvise.
Overall, though, this is a pretty great one-shot module. The gimmick is really fun, and would work both as a one-shot and to kick off a new campaign. It’s easy to run, and the NPCs and enemies are fun to step into the shoes of. If you’re happy to do a little bit of prep for memories in advance, or you’re a confident improviser, and the gimmick here is something that appeals to you and to your table, I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up More of Me.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
The Waking of Willoughby Hall is a 31 page module, simply statted for most fantasy RPGs in the B/X lineage, by Ben Milton with art by Sam Mamelli. In it, your adventuring party is caught up in the aftermath of another, separate adventuring party’s raid of a golden goose from a giant’s castle, and is trapped in a haunted house which is slowly being awakened by the giant holy exorcising bell that it stole by coincidence from a local church. I bought this on Drivethru.
If you are a little overwhelmed by the set up, fair enough, so am I. It’s a lot. I can’t help but imagine a version of this module that feels less haphazard in its theming, and simpler for the players to wrap their head around without considerable opening exposition. The advantage, though is that it front-loads the module with factions to be used against each other, namely the giant, the rival adventuring party, and the feral goose. I especially like, out of these three, that the goose slips your mind until you encounter it, whereupon it acts like the goose in Untitled Goose Game.
Now, hand-guy extraordinaire of Questing Beast and creator of both Knave and Maze Rats Ben Milton wrote this, and we’d expect accordingly a strong opinion in this text of what a module is intended to be like. I think we get that, and it’s also clear than Ben has a stronger opinion on information design and layout in modules than would be apparent from his reviews, and that’s a good thing, in my opinion. We’ll come back to what I think this module says about what Ben likes in a moment.
What is immediately apparent is: No room numbers, but a fully labeled map with short descriptions right there on the page open the first five pages of the book. Cartography isn’t pretty, but boy is it clear and usable. I love the fully labelled map, but I think it’s misguided in its choices: I’m always going to turn to the page in the book (conveniently provided on the map, to boot) for a room, so I think the information on the map should be about exits and what you can hear or see through the entrances; a “key the hallways” type approach. But it’s damned fine as it is.
There are some rules covering the awakening of the hall and the actions of the giant as it pursues you (and the other adventuring party — it seems it’s not picky) and the encounter tables. These are elegant, but could have been clearer. I kept looking through the text for more things that happen as the hall awakens, but despite it implying otherwise, I didn’t notice any. I like the encounter tables, and there’s a lot of specificity and variety in them for a small 34 room (if my count is right) map; at 60 encounters you probably won’t see them all. But, perhaps I’m misunderstanding the nature of the action here.
Why? Well, the player characters are trapped in the house. It’s unlikely they’ll all survive the dash to safety, so there’s a decent chance they’ll (or some of them) survive by ending the curse on the house or by betraying the second party of adventurers. Perhaps this is the purpose of the unusual random encounter density: Because they’ll tread and retread the same spaces, getting to know their cast of friends and foes.
Most of the introduction is the bestiary; that bestiary is jarring and feels unnecessary until you wade into it, but what we get are quarter-page descriptions of every creature you’ll encounter, effectively turning almost everything you find in the hall into a faction of its own (the exception being the Death Knight’s skeletal servants). And they’re all bite-sized, despite taking up such a large space in aggregate, thanks to Sam Mamelli’s characterful work doing a significant amount of lifting.
One repeating theme here is clarity to the referee, to the point where the rare things that lack clarity are jarring. Clearly the author put a lot of effort into this, and it shows. An example is that the few words it would have taken to explain how Elias would preserve the hall or which forbidden knowledge he might be satisfied with are left out; there are many options in the text, but it feels strange that it’s not in the character description given the apparent intent of the overall design. I’m not opposed to texts that obscure this kind of information — I do so in my work and I’m a fan of things like the Isle and Lorn Song of the Bachelor that treat information in a subtler manner — but it doesn’t feel like it should be treated that way here.
The location descriptions themselves are simplified down to three layers of indentation and bolding as discriminatory choices, and no more than half a page per description. I don’t find the indentation particularly successful. The information loaded bullet styling that Miranda Elkins uses in Nightwick Abbey and that I adapted in my module Curse of Mizzling Grove would be an improvement here, as would the dagger motif used in Beyond the Pale. But I appreciate the simplicity, although it wouldn’t be effective in a more complex location. The descriptions are workmanlike, and not striking or evocative: Aside from what’s in them or what opportunities they present, the hall is a playground for random encounters and the faction interactions.
Let’s loop back to identifying the thesis of Willoughby Hall: Dungeons aren’t playgrounds or gauntlets to Ben, but rather a stage on which compelling and iconic characters interact. Layout and overall document design should prioritise clarity at all costs, sacrificing depth and complexity. Maps should be utilitarian and clear, not beautiful. Everything should be geared towards minimal page-turning, and so all fit on one or less pages. Indexing should be at a minimum, and so room numbers are forsaken in favour of page numbers. This desire for clarity sometimes results in mistaking simplicity for clarity, and hence not having the desired result, however.
The Waking of Willoughby Hall is a fun, light-hearted romp, that won’t nearly fit in many tables’ existing campaigns due to its specificity. That’s a charming specificity, but a limiting one. But it is a hell of a lot of fun, and easy as pie to run, even if it doesn’t nail every inch of its landing. I’d definitely recommend it as a one shot, even if it’s hard to recommend as a campaign drop-in unless your campaign has a very, very specific flavour.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
Roach Motel is a 35 page module for Mothership by Norgad, which funded as part of Mothership Month in 2025. In it you are trapped in a maze with your mind wiped, and need to learn what’s going on in order to escape. I was sent a complementary copy by the author.
The opening few pages are introduction, first with an overview, then with a timeline, then with a more detailed 2-page summary of the organisation behind it all. I usually like this format, but in this case, there’s a lot of module-specific jargon — m-light, crown, blockers, Jamie, kill-dogs — that prevents me from really absorbing the information presented from lack of context. I know this amounts to “I need to read 3 pages to figure out what’s going on”, which is a very minor concern, but I think with a little reorganisation this could’ve been more intuitive. Then we have four hooks. I love these, largely because they’re each an attempt at changing the way the player characters will interact with the module ahead — an excellent implementation of what I’ve called Juicy Worms — that tailor your experience quite well. They’re also targeted at the whole party, instead of at individuals, which is a fun differentiator.
Then we start getting into the module proper. We have a page of NPCs and other cast members, first. Some of these descriptions slap: “Only two bullets left and he knows it.“, “…bends makeshift handcuffs; noncompliants’ bones suffer a similar fate”. Some of them, like the hive-mind bounty hunger, are conceptually excellent, but I think need a bigger twist to be memorable. I’ll come back to procedures, which is next, then we have some details on running M-Light, using Blockers, and how to run Jamie, the main foe. There are summaries of all of this in the inside covers except for running Jamie, and I kind of wish Jamie were covered, as I think I’ll be flicking back to this. Then we have an explanation of the mapping and keying; this is important, because due to the size of this dungeon, Norgad, well known for terse descriptions, is getting more and more extreme brevity, and relying on visual as well as written signifiers that you’ll have to remember. Do I hate this? No. Will some people struggle? I suspect so. I think that for a node-based “dungeon” like this and most that occur in Mothership, though, this approach is going to be super effective and easy to run, once you internalise the visual shorthand.
This is the explanation of the shorthand found in the text.
Procedures cover events — random encounters — and the alert level of the hounds; I think these are both best if simplified to one roll, but let me talk through it: The events table is rolled whenever the crew explores a room, and you roll 2d10 and an event occurs on a double. The number rolled determines the event; usually these events occur on more than one number, for example 0-1 or 7-9. This means there’s 2-3% chance of any particular event occurring; 10% chance of any event occurring. There are, I admit, a lot of rooms here — you’re going to roll this probably 100 times — but this feels like an exceedingly low chance of any of these specific events occurring, and particularly when some of these vents aren’t particularly impactful — “A rat scampers through the room, chasing down a fleeing cockroach” — I feel like this complexity doesn’t pay off. I’d rather more of the interesting events occur: “A Call for help, someone’s lost. Genuine, surprised if anyone answers.” I could see how potentially, the alert system might increase the incidence of perceived encounters though, and might balance this out: The Alert system uses an attention counter that increases over time, and when you under or equal to that counter on a separate d10, the hounds find you, causing the next Hound Encounter to occur. My gut feeling is, though, that if you’re changing the events roll in this way, you could simply incorporate the alert roll into the same one. How? Well, at a glance, if you simply take the highest die, and don’t say “or equal to”, the math turns out awfully similar, although not precisely the same, and it also introduces a curve where the risk of encountering hounds increases more over time, which provides a sense of verisimilitude. I’d make this change if I were to run this, I think.
The keying itself: I can’t talk about this without talking layout, to be honest. Norgad is really excelling. Each spread is an area, of which there are 10 in total, and each page has 3 columns. The leftmost column is a sidebar with overarching details about the area, and the events table. The other 5 (ish, it does vary depending on the area) columns are both a map and the key of the area. The keying is confusing when you first look at the map on the inside back cover, as I did, but when you read the book, each area is numbered after the page it’s on, which reduces the information you need to know to flick through the booklet; rooms in the area are alphabetical to facilitate this, and that’s the only possible problem here: There are a bunch of “G”s across the book. But, I suspect it won’t be a problem, practically, because you’re probably navigating using the book rather than the map on the inside cover. If you like Norgad’s writing style, I think it’s at its’ best here, but you are definitely going to have to be doing the heavy lifting in terms of holding the area description and combining the title and single sentence descriptions that most rooms have, which are usually as simple as “Swirling pools of colour” or “Underfoot, bones crack.” It’s great writing, but is it too brief? Maybe. Certainly the structure helps support your improvisation well, but I wonder if truly the single sentence description of “body odour and must” is anything other than an affect, when I will have to follow up with cardboard box fort anyway.
The last spread covers other spaces you might encounter that are outside the hotel, all that I like, none of which I’m clear where they fit into the module itself. I think they’re intended as a source for rumours, in the context of running this in Prospero’s dream; this isn’t mentioned on the outset though. It’s good writing though; when Norgad is given license to ramble, it’s gorgeous. Then we have a list of potential escape methods, and also fallout based on various outcomes. I love these as bookends, but: How to actually exit the facility is (I think accidentally) obscured, unless you read it very closely, and not marked clearly on the map at all. A major oversight, in my opinion.
The inside front cover is an absolutely wildly huge map — not every room is uniquely keyed, but there are probably 100 rooms here — as well as common stats and a summary of procedures. This is very, very dense, and in digital I find it difficult to read, although it might be better in print which is obviously the primary intent. A lot of icons are used to condense this information, which at a glance is a bit much, but if you read through it carefully first, it does make sense. The inside back cover is a d100 lost property list, which is fine, I guess. Better than nothing, but I’m starting to want more out of these long lists than simply stuff so I don’t have to think of stuff. I’d love for more of these to tie together with other aspects of the module itself, or, given that this module is connected to Prospero’s Dream, the developing official Mothership universe. I also, as I mentioned above, think that the left page of the inside back spread could’ve been better used, given it’s a full page artwork, and there were things I felt I’d refer back to. Overall, the module is hyper-dense, and low-art, much like Norgad’s previous work, but with really clean and workable layout that is nevertheless visually appealing. What little art and colour is used is gorgeous, although I think given the colour is present at all, it might have been utilised better throughout the text as a highlight.
I’ve got questions, though. I have trouble comprehending what the shape of play here will be from the text. Despite being a huge space, there isn’t a lot going on here in terms of faction play. The wanderers featured might join the party, but they aren’t going to drive a lot of organic action. The main drivers of play here appear to be Jamie and the Hounds. While you theoretically can encounter Jamie in other spaces and can be mesmerised by things other than Jamie, a search indicates that most of the time your exposure to M-light and hence mesmerism will be in Jamie’s home space of Observation. So, I think that what this will look like in play is fleeing and avoiding the Hounds while collecting clues about what happened and why your memories of certain spaces are missing, until you can get past Jamie and to the exit. In practice, going back to those event rules and hound encounters, I don’t think they’re likely to be triggered a lot because there’s not actually a lot of incentive to do the two things that trigger them: explore, spend significant time, or be loud. It might be more of an exercise in mapping a complex space, to be honest, and the lack of a player-facing map suggests this was intended as a sort of navigation challenge; I do think the “not-to-scale” nature of the map will make this a little more challenging than a to scale map, though. I would absolutely love to hear a play report of this, because while Norgad’s modules tend to be experimental, previous modules like Dead Weight and Brackish had more comprehensible shapes to them.
I’d be remiss not to mention Jamie in a little more detail: As a primary antagonist, this creature is fascinating, and well described to help the referee to run a creature without human drives or responses. There’s an aura of mystery to him that will pervade the module, even if you figure out a way around the puzzle that surrounds him. I don’t think I’ve seen quite as compelling a primary antagonist to a module. However, I think that the potential is stymied in a one major way: He will interact with the world primarily by using his capacity to mesmerise the other characters and order them using his command cards. I expected to find these command cards scattered around the space, but instead they’re all concentrated in a small space, 10 or so useful commands. I would’ve expected part of the race be that Jamie would be looking for more cards and experimenting with them, but instead they’re simply intended to be used as a keys to the lock that is Jamie and mesmerism. This space is deadly as hell, too — I’d want to be ready with backup characters — but also if you die it’ll potentially happen off screen. Is this a bad thing? Hard to say — the puzzle I expect is hard to solve and complicating it with more commands will make it harder to figure out — but I also feel like there’s a whole module here with this character or one similar to it that remains unwritten.
Norgad’s stuff is consistently innovative and interesting, and iterates on the earlier innovations each time he releases. If you’re interested in new ways to approach module design both in terms of writing and visual design, you need to pick this up; I imagine we’ll see iterations on this in the future, because the design absolutely slaps. On the other hand, I’m not sure how the module will run at the table. It suggests 3-5 hours of play, but my gut says it’ll take longer, and may feature more death than is indicated. The pitch is hard, because the mystery is difficult to talk around, and the prime directive of the module is solving that mystery. I don’t honestly know that I’ll bring Roach Motel to the table, unlike Brackish and Dead Weight. But, if this review has your interest piqued, I think it’s well worth checking out.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
The Cursed Cave of a Billion Bats is a 20 page one-shot or tournament system-agnostic module by Dale Houston. In it, you are drawn into the so-called “Nightmare Cave” with the promise of gold, but will you survive? I received a complementary copy from the author.
The layout is dense, but clear, with smart usability choices like having no locations crossing pages. The only potential problem I can see is that it uses colour coding on the maps to signify climb difficulty, room environment, and the presence of large clouds of bats, which is visually busy and potentially won’t work for all visions — easily fixed by using different shading or dotted vs. bold lines, or something of the like. Both cover by Daniel Harila Carlsen, and the interior art by Perplexing Ruins are excellent, although I’d love to have seen less pages with no illustration. The maps — a three-dimensional cave map and a point-crawl map for those having trouble with the first, are both pretty great — the primary map especially I think does a great job of communicating the interconnected nature of the space without it becoming overwhelming.
Our first page is our hook. and the local village Flotsammar. It’s simple, in a way I genuinely love, with contrasts that raise questions that I hope the dungeon will reveal to me. The three NPCs here have interesting characterisations that make me want to play them, although I’d love for them to have clearer reasons to manipulate the player characters in one direction or another, or bait them into the dungeon. We have 3 d6 tables of rumours, as well, although only 2 of them are on the surface about the Cave, and the other, about the town, would require me to improvise a bit more town than I’d prefer to. Overall. though, it’s a great initial impression.
I mentioned the three dimensional cave map, and it’s well supported by the rules on traversing the cursed cave, which pulls in rules about how light interacts with the bats, and about how to climb shafts of varying difficulty, and also how to secure them, making the dungeon a bit of a metroidvania in terms of making difficult climbs and securing them, or finding alternate ways to the top of hard climbs in order to secure them for quicker traversal. The only misstep I think is that it doesn’t explain these rules directly to the players: I would. It does say “make sure they know the amount of light is important“, but I’d probably include this as something that would be said to the players in town, so that it’s very clear that too much light will disturb the bats. It’s something that could’ve been baked into the world-building, rather than just given as advice.
The module is explicitly a deadly module, which results in a lot of combat encounters, but ones that effort is put into to make interesting — a favourite is the flea knight who leaps in and out of combat. Expect 12 empty rooms and the rest being occupied by either combat or hazards; I’d love for a little more of interest to be in those 12 empty rooms, though. They’re appropriately empty, I think, because rest and space to flee and regroup the difficult combat encounters and bat swarms are necessary for survival, but I’d love to have seen a little more lore parcelled out in pieces throughout them that would allow you to form opinions about Aramor the Mad and the curse of the cave before getting to the final room; this would add some interesting spice to the module that simply isn’t there right now: Why wouldn’t you murder and take the treasure? Random encounters will likely occupy many of those empty rooms, but half of these are combat encounters (most with creatures you’ll see elsewhere in the dungeon, but that aren’t tied to specific rooms), and the others being debuffs with no particular warning. I’d love to have attached some kind of warning or choice to these random encounters. There is one absolutely fantastic one, though, which more heavily looped dungeons should use: A chamber collapse, which renders a room impassible, and will require further exploration. You could base an entire module around this one random encounter to compelling effect, I think.
The book finishes with treasure and monsters. Some very fun and well-described treasure is in this list. The monsters, are well-described, particularly in terms of tactics, but I fear players may have trouble differentiating between all the bat-themed creatures. I also wish the flea-themed creatures had been given a bit more space, because they’re cool — is there a culture of flea-people? I want to know about them! I’ll have to look more into Houston’s other work, though, because the monster stats have a few features I really like, pulled by a variety of potential sources. As well as typical HD, AC, and Movement, they have a mien, ferocity, and weaknesses, as well as “encounters” which describes why you might be meeting them. This is cool stuff, although it would benefit from clearer description — it’s clear that Ferocity is effectively morale, but I don’ t know what Ap or Threat necessarily means.
Finally there’s a score sheet, because this is a tournament module. I, relatively recently talked about how I wish there were more tournament modules with score sheets: This slaps, and makes the module far more playable, particularly if they know at least roughly the score sheet, which will push them towards even more foolhardy choices.
Cursed Cave of One Billion Bats is a really cool, one-shot module, with a lot of cool design choices. At the table, you might want to make sure your players are excited about high lethality, combat intensive play, and there’s not a lot of lore or puzzle-like inclusions to keep those who aren’t engaged. If you were to run this at a small con with a few tables, the tournament score sheet would make for a lot of fun. In a lot of ways, it’s a few strong steps towards meeting modern module expectations with some very specific old-school sensibilities that are rarely considered. I really liked Cursed Cave of One Billion Bats, and if you’re looking for a lethal one shot or are interested in something to run tournament style at a small con, I’d take a look.
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